CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Finding and developing macroscopic descriptions for thedynamics of large ensembles of highly mobile host and/or pathogenssubject to modern forms of dispersal pose tremendous challenges toresearchers involved in the development and implementation oflocal, regional, national and global public health policies in thepresence of often unexpected, threats of undetermined or uncertainorigin. In addition, the study of the dynamics of highly mobilehost and/or pathogens provide opportunities for thecomputational, modeling and mathematical communities in manydirections that include finding new ways of applying existingmathematical methods or through the development of new modelingframeworks. Moreover, the challenges involved in dissectingcomplex systems have generated opportunities to mathematicians inapplied and pure mathematics. Further, recent advances incomputation (hardware, software and theory) mean that today lqlqwe" are no longer committed just to the study of simple systems orat best the study of complex systems over limited lqlq windows"in time and space. Today, we can, in fact, apply continuousadvances in the computational sciences to the solution of problemsat the interphase of the life and social sciences. That is, thestudy of systems whose dynamics are driven by processes that takeplace over multiple temporal and spatial scales; systems that inaddition, must routinely account for the inherent levels ofheterogeneity of its biological components. This manuscript, andits companion, lqlq Change in Host Behavior and its Impact onthe Transmission Dynamics of Dengue" (F. Sanchez, D. Murillo andCastillo-Chavez, this volume) highlights some of the challenges inthe context of the dynamics of vector-transmitted diseases,particularly dengue. It is the hope that these contributions willmotivate members of this community, particularly those who are newto the field of mathematical biology, to tackle the challengesposed by the study of complex systems.